I Talked to People on Tinder About 'Serial' and This is What Happened

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm just going to venture a confident guess that, at this point, the two most distracting, obsessed over, time-consuming things on the average American's phone are Tinder and Serial. Between these two six-letter time-killers, American productivity has slowed to almost an entire halt; we're all officially too busy trying to find someone with whom to stay warm in bed for the next few months, ideally where we will spend endless hours alternating between making out and debating whether or not Adnan actually killed Hae. This is The American Dream: Winter 2014 Edition.

Being the industrious little problem-solver I am, and being that I have simultaneous, pressing compulsions to understand other humans but also to never actually look up from my phone and interact with them, I came up with a plan: I would take to Tinder and try to talk to people about Serial. By which I mean, I would refuse to engage them in conversation unless they would discuss Serial with me (which, incidentally, has recently been my policy not just in the mobile meat market, but in life; I was born for this kind of merciless scrutiny of would-be romantic partners based on completely arbitrary shit). So I started by putting a simple call-to-action in my Tinder profile (after all, any healthy relationship is based on an ability to clear state and advocate for your needs).

I figured throwing in a few actual details about my life—that I’m a writer, that I produced a fresh human not so long ago, etc.—would make me look a little less like I was on Tinder solely to talk about Serial. Also, to quote one friend, I needed to "say something about myself in case my future husband is on there." ...OK.

I wondered, first, if anyone would even go for this. The success of this experiment hinged on two things: People actually reading my Tinder profile, and Tinderlings being into Serial. As it turns out, I needn’t have been concerned about either. Here’s the story of what happened.